Jurors weep at sniper trial

JURORS wept yesterday as they listened to a recording of Linda Franklin’s husband wailing and sobbing as he made the emergency call reporting his wife’s sniper shooting.

“I’m at the Home Depot on Route 50,” William Franklin screamed into a cell phone. The former Marine testified he had been sprayed with his wife’s blood, turned and saw her lying on the pavement. His words on the tape melted into loud cries. “She’s shot in the head. Oh, my God.”

The three-minute 911 recording hushed Courtroom 10 in one of the most emotional moments in John Allen Muhammad’s capital murder trial. Jurors also saw disturbing photos of Linda Franklin’s head wounds and her body lying in the Fairfax County parking lot.

In addition to wrenching testimony from Franklin’s husband and daughter, the witnesses put names and faces to some of the most significant events of last fall’s sniper slayings.

Witnesses included the Ashland, Virginia priest who took a call from the snipers, the Rockville police dispatcher who received the sniper’s indignant call, the Prince George’s County officer who found the “Call me God” tarot card and the Florida motorist who survived a shooting at an Ashland restaurant.

Strategically, prosecutors used the day’s testimony to begin trying to establish a crucial element of their case: that the sniper shootings were part of a plan to terrorise the public.

The strategy has drawn the ire of Muhammad’s attorneys, who have objected to the use of dramatic evidence, arguing they do nothing more than evoke emotion from the jury.

Muhammad, 42, is charged with capital murder in the October 9, 2002, slaying of Dean H Meyers, aged 53, at a Sunoco station north of Manassas.

Prosecutors are using 15 other shootings, to establish a pattern and to satisfy a provision of Virginia’s death penalty laws.